UK appears to have incited Austrian authorities to target journalist already persecuted and charged under Starmer regime’s war on pro-Palestine journalism
British journalist Richard Medhurst has been raided and detained by Austrian police apparently acting on behalf of the UK state that has already targeted Medhurst and others as part of the Starmer regime’s war on journalists and activists that expose and oppose Israel’s genocide and other crimes in Gaza.
Medhurst, the Christian child of Nobel Peace Prize winners who has residency in Austria, was summoned to a meeting with Austrian authorities but then ambushed by intelligence officers and suffered the seizure of multiple computers and other electronic devices. His house was ransacked well beyond the terms of their search warrant – nineteen pages of seized items were handed to him as a receipt – and he was accused, ludicrously, of being a member of Palestinian militia group Hamas and warned that his residency may be revoked.
Medhurst explained what happened in a video posted late on Thursday 6 Jan. It is posted below as a YouTube embed, but Skwawkbox has also subtitled it and added it as a video file in case YouTube removes it. Please watch by clicking the YouTube embed as long as it is available, to ensure he receives any YouTube revenues:
The funding links Medhurst mentions are: PayPal: https://paypal.me/papichulomin GoFundMe: http://tiny.cc/GoFundMe-Richard.
Medhurst has been charged in the UK with refusing to hand over passwords to his devices – basically for doing his job as a journalist and protecting sources’ confidentiality – as part of Keir Starmer’s misuse of terror laws to harass, persecute and attempt to intimidate, criminalise and silence pro-Palestine voices.
So egregious is this ‘lawfare’ abuse that the United Nations Office for Human Rights wrote in December to the UK government demanding an end to it – but their letter has been ignored by Starmer and co. The practice appears to be spreading – as well as Medhurst’s mistreatment now, in late January, Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah was detained and deported from Switzerland a day after arriving there to speak at a Swiss event.
The UK under ‘Zionist without qualification‘ Starmer is a police state defending a rogue and terror state from the consequences of its mass murder and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and its war crimes of torture, starvation, forced transferm, bombing of hospitals and medics and mass arbitrary detentions.
Solidarity with Medhurst and all those targeted by the Starmer regime.
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I can’t see Israel being prosecuted at the ICC or ICJ now.
Israel is literally clearing out the Gaza Strip “for America” yet Channel 4 News still cannot bring itself to mention ethnic cleansing. After a brief flirtation last night I will go back to not watching the unwatchable; it is not independent news but stupifying drugs. It is not an antisemitic trope: Israel ‘owns’ the MSM in much of the West. We know this because their treatment if Russia were doing this in Ukraine would be vastly different, and so would our governments’.
They already are. The genocide accusation us still proceeding. It takes a long time.
The nazis did the same thing……
Meanwhile,
https://archive.ph/3Pp0U#selection-543.0-543.155
“U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts
Secret order requires blanket access to protected cloud backups around the
world, which if implemented would undermine Apple’s privacy pledge to
its users.
Security officials in the UK have demanded that Apple create a back
door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide
has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The
Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires
blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely
assistance in cracking a specific account, & has no known precedent in
major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for
tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as
government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under
the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive
issues.”
In other words, you will stick The Official Narrative or else.
Here is a more detailed commentary onthe issue:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/who-else-wants-access-to-apple-users-encrypted-data.html#more
“The office of the Home Secretary has served Apple with a document called a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies when needed to collect evidence, the people said.
The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Apple had been warned that such an order was coming and did protest to no avail.
Neither the Biden nor the Trump administration seem to support Apple:
Senior national security officials in the Biden administration had been tracking the matter since the United Kingdom first told the company it might demand access and Apple said it would refuse. It could not be determined whether they raised objections to Britain. Trump White House and intelligence officials declined to comment.
One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security. The person deemed it shocking that the U.K. government was demanding Apple’s help to spy on non-British users without their governments’ knowledge. A former White House security adviser confirmed the existence of the British order.”
As MoA observes:
“The best way to prevent snooping access requests is to liberate the data of those people who demand it. Some Apple engineer might want to think about that. “